“I’m there to be with them,” Jeff declared to Paper Magazine with a sort of Joan Crawford I-live-for-my-fans intensity “If the club says it’s not legal to have people sucking my dick I’ll say I’m sorry it’s not possible.” The words “I must be about my Father’s business” seemed to hover in the air. The interviewer needed elucidation. Jeff happily accomodated: “They just want to go down on me. What can I say? — no?”

By his own sunny lights, the Sing and Strip tour was greeted with joy and universal celebration. "Sometimes," he wrote, in that dizzy Desi-Arnaz English we have come to cherish, "I feel I’m dreaming — but I’m awaked!"

What heart of stone could not be exhilarated in the face of such conviction? Here is a marvelous creature who never had one moment of self-doubt. Oh, certainly, there are some glamorous noises about "my confusing life" but the confusion comes from having too many, rather than too few, gorgeous choices. More typically we read "the chemistry between us was electricity all over my body," describing one of those daily encounters that seemed to carpet Jeff’s rose-petaled path through the world.

Even an HIV+ diagnosis in 1997 could not dim his sense of well-being. Nor did he keep it from his faithful readers. His diary soon declared HIV was a hoax concocted by the United States government. He was throwing away his AIDS medications, which he denounced as poisons and bogus nostrums*. Inflamed with a new mission, he became an evangelist for AIDS denial. His website now stared off with the proclamation: “”Jeff Palmer does not have hiv, anyone saying otherwise must provide proof, defamation is a crime.” Defiantly, he continued to have anal sex without condoms in his videos and to hold fellatial autograph sessions.

With AIDS dispatched, soon we were reading: “it was beyond spectacular performing live my brand new song “Faggot” in front of around 700 people at “Firestone” which is the biggest nightclub in the whole State of Florida.” Adding a few lines later, “so I started dancing in one of the boxes in the dance floor with the crowd, and sure I showed my butt hole really well, it looked very huge and inviting from that box with high lights…”

In a lesser diarist such self-promotion would seem suspect or defensive. Jeff is so certain of his own goodness that though his web diary sounds as absurd as a porn plot, one becomes convinced every word is true. We are talking about a self-love so generous, one that rises in sparkling arcs throughout the writing like so many rapturous fountains, that to Jeff, no lie, no matter how face-saving, could possibly outshine the brilliant facts.

Waving his star-making machinery around, a miracle intervened

And so by his own hand, we learn how often he irrigates his colon, how much better he feels without his AIDS cocktail, how much "yummy esperma" he drank in the last 24 hours, how much of that same "leche" he’s holding in the contoured fastness of "my warm love hole". Unabashed, he writes down every self-absorbed detail, no matter how microsopic. It is his gospel of divine predestination.

Take, for instance, that moment of Miracle and Wonder when he narrowly escaped arrest for a bit of oral sex that just happened to develop when he was wagging his star-making machinery around during a strip show in New York. He was in the middle of his dance, his leather jockstrap “with the studs” shed many minutes before, when he got … well, this feeling. One imagines a shaft of light suddenly spotlighting him on the cocktail-strewn bartop and a C-major chord intoned by alto voices. And here’s what this feeling said to our devout porn prince. Be thou gone, Jeff! Be thou in a cab 20 blocks from here … and be quick, you horny bastard! Or words to that effect.

"I really fucking know that God was protecting me," he was moved to write afterward, "cause the police has been quite few times lately in ‘Splash Bar’ but normally they do it on the weekends so all of my biggest thanks go to all of the fucking awesome angels that Jesus sent to protect me and give me such amazing first day of turning 26 years old."

Thus are the mysterious ways of the Nazarene, whom Jeff thanks at every turn: For his boyfriend "Papito" (obviously, they have an open relation- ship), for the existence of pot (which is not a drug, be advised, but "a plant created by God"), for curing his meth addiction in such a special supernatural way that he can continue to use it, and for the "fantastico" sales figures on the self-produced DVD Jeff Palmer RAW where he displays for the first time what he cheerfully calls his "versatility": he performs as both Best Top and Best Bottom in the Whole Wide World.

In fact [at the time of this writing], he wants his fans to know that he’s already at work on a new epic of unconditional sex, affirming with glee that it will be "bareback — of course!" An assertion likely to floor those readers still under the delusion that HIV is, in fact, a fact.

Like an orphan prince in a fairytale, Jeff has always had a star to guide him. “How I hate realism,” he might say, like another dreamwalker, his spiritual sister Blanche Dubois. “I don’t want realism” she declares as she covers an exposed lightbulb in the soft flattering fantasy of a Chinese lantern. “I want magic!”

But then don’t we all?

*Jeff now allows that he may have been wrong about AIDS treatments and is currently under a doctor’s care. He is also retired. Blessed as he is with an irrepressible disposition, he still keeps up his web diary.